


Et in Arcadia Ego - Even in Arcadia, there am I.

by CallmeIsmail



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Art, Art History, Bologna, Bucholic, Historical References, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Painting, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Plague, Pseudo-History, Sex, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:15:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25343059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CallmeIsmail/pseuds/CallmeIsmail
Summary: Niccolò and Yusuf, before they were Nicky and Joe.They still have a couple of months left, he muses one day over a sunset, as they lie on a grass field and Yusuf’s frame is bathed in the golden rays of the sun, and they might as well enjoy it.“What should I do?”, he says in arabic, while placing a flower crown over the top of his lover’s head.Yusuf shrugs, rolls over on his stomach and places his head on Niccolò’s knee before responding.“Paint?”Nicky's take on the plague that spread through Northern Italy in 1630.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 13
Kudos: 112





	Et in Arcadia Ego - Even in Arcadia, there am I.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, hello there!  
> I'm finally able to publish into this fandom. I was inspired by the idea of Joe as an artist through Italy's renaissance so I decided to spice things a bit and switch the period of his greatest production - wait for it - during the early decades of the Italian 17th century. Full of so many great artists.The title and the subject of the story are inspired by two paintings that herald the same title, one by the italian artist Guercino and another by the french painter Nicolas Poussin, both super beautiful, both super pensive. For translations and general historical clarifications I have put more notes at the end of the chapter. Please enjoy! <3

1628, September.

It is the smell of freshly baked pastries, filled to the brim with a thick mostarda jam - so sweet it makes Yusuf's tongue water just at the thought - wrapped between multiple layers of the spared cotton rags Niccolò was able to collect throughout the surfaces of the franciscans’ soup kitchen he is currently working in and carefully laid down in a vimine basket that the man has carried around the streets of Bologna up to one painter Guido Reni's atelier , the first clue that lets Yusuf know that the new presence in the Great Master's working quarters is that of the love of his life, that he indeed finds on the other side of the table, where the subject for a new possible painting of the elderly Reni is being cartooned by none other than the curly-headed man that everyone around the two immortals call ' Giuseppe l'Africano' - Joseph the African.

Sketched with the tiniest piece of charcoal and highlighted by the remaining whiting, both substances staining his lover's fingers and hands, the _Armida_ lays melancholic, tearful, half naked, only covered by a veil as transparent as rain ( that a characteristic that differentiates Yusuf's work from that of anyone else) over Rinaldo's arms,a tiny figure in contrast to the powerful crests and branches of the trees and the wild nature surrounding her, settling her as a props to a much larger painting, depicting the lingering, heavy moments of dense tranquility before the tempest of Armida's rage. 

_Et in Arcadia Ego_ , the words that the barely sketched sentence recites at the right lower end of the charcoaled cardboard - _Even in Arcadia, there I am_.

A Paradise that’s about to turn into a Pandemonium.

It will be rejected, as usual. After all, it can barely count as what the Master calls 'a painting worth of a bishop', so inclined to landscaping as it is. But Niccolò has always enjoyed his love's keen eye over the details and produges of nature, as much as he loves the sweet smile - old as time - that the man promptly gives him upon lifting his head from the piece of paper. Yusuf scouts over the table and, hands still black from the charcoal and apron over his clothes, he closes the distance between himself and his lover until he can take the former priest's face in his hands and - in front of everybody in the room - give in into a passionate kiss.

The other helpers rarely take notice of them, as accustomed to the two's love effusions as they are, but from somewhere at the back of the room he can hear Arnolfo's whistling and the occasional cackling of some of the new apprentices – boys, roughly a little bit more than children.

They part, catching their breath, panting, acting as if they could die, as if a lack of air has ever been a problem for them, as if they hadn't actually tried to melt into one another's mouths and bodies before today.

Yusuf's smile grows wider, gentler and his hands skim from Niccolò's slightly bearded cheeks to his hands, down where the man's knuckles hold the basket full of _pinze._

 _"_ Che cosa mi porti oggi, amore mio?", Yusuf asks.

"Pinze.", Niccolò replies, raising the vimine container, taking a look around. "Pinze per tutti quanti!", he says a little bit louder and whatever Master Reni's associates might have been busying themselves with is promptly dropped.

The whole gang cheerfully approaches the pair and patiently awaits for Niccolò to unfold the cloth over the warm pieces of jammed bread and utter a silent prayer before distributing the food, just like Christ with the bread and the fish, the same subject of a painting that lays hanging on the wall over their heads, a wooden piece belonging to the very first years of Reni's apprenticeship with the great flemish artist, Denijs Calvaert. 

They all take a place around the room after thanking Niccolò, reminding him to extend their gratitude to Padre Germano as well, the one-eyed friar head of the kitchens of _San Francesco_ 's soup kitchen, who always allows him to bring something for the other workers of the atelier too, not only for _l'Africano_.

Niccolò smiles, and thanks them in return, as Yusuf - Giuseppe, as he calls him now - places a hand over his lover's flank and invites him to seat at the edge of the wooden table the african’s cartoon currently lays on.

They take small bites out of their portion, savouring their food and this shared moment of general serenity.

It has never been like this, not in the five hundred years Niccolò and Yusuf have been together.

Not even once since their very first kiss after escaping from Jerusalem, from the first time they ever made love in Isfahan, have they ever met such acceptance from the people around them.

They've been in Italy for almost forty years now, since 1594, as soon as the situation in France had settled once again - even if Henry IV's coronation would prove itself to be unable to seal a long-lasting peace as they would soon discover - after Andromaca and Quyhn had led them through the wars of religion that set Europe on fire since Luther first refused to retract, against which they could do little, if not rescuing as many people as they could, whether they be children, heretics or tired, abused farmers who had rebelled against their lords.

So much death, so much hatred.

In a way, it had reminded Niccolò of the same situation he and his love had found each other, many centuries ago, but it also reminded him of the person Niccolò used to be: brimmed with misplaced anger. Seething with hatred.

He had needed a break.

And so he and Yusuf had travelled back to his former home, first to Genova, then to Rome and then again to Venezia, before finally settling in Bologna, just a couple of years ago.

The city had quickly become their _arcadia_ , a timeless, problemless heaven, since the very first day they had set foot inside the walls of the Felsina.

Maybe it hadn't been only Niccolò the one tired of war, of rage, and as Yusuf quickly came to be known as the painter called l'Africano - working in and around other great artists as a helper and assistant - their sharing a home behind the very well known Basilica of San Francesco -where Niccolò had volunteered as a cook for the poor's kitchen - a home with only one bed, was dismissed by the people who surrounded them with such a kind nonchalance and normality that it had almost taken the former priest aback.

Not even once had they been chased out of their home, not even once did they wake in the middle of the night to find some lousy fucker aiming their fists and plunging their swords and daggers at them like it had happened so many times before.

Niccolò, for once, didn’t have to fear what this people – _his people_ \- would do, he didn’t have to watch – as fists pinned him down - his beloved’s clothes being torn off of his body by cruel hands that mockingly roamed over the skin that the christians loathed so much, vengeful arms of people that took unspeakable liberties with Yusuf, filling his arse and his mouth with cock after cock whilst spitting on him, yelling ‘heathen’, ‘beast’, ‘scourge’, ‘witch’, ‘whore’, before dragging the both of them to the streets, where they would drench them in tar and set them on fire.

No, they had wandered through the nations of Italy peacefully, undisturbed.

They even managed to purchase a house in the outskirts of Romagna, a small cottage in the woods between Bologna and Ravenna, that was once the home of a lonely miller, in broad daylight, completely legally, formally.

There they had built their safehouse, their kingdom of love, under the branches of old pine trees and the rivulets of the stream behind the building that now upon a closer look Niccolò recognised as the setting of the _Armida_.

It had been their paradise, the arcadia they could always seek refuge in – whenever tired or inspired- but in retrospect Niccolò should have known it wasn’t going to last, just like his lover’s painting foretold, even as now he looks into Giuseppe’s eyes and smiles back at him, reaching for his hand.

After all, nothing lasts forever and Niccolò has made peace with this knowledge a long time ago.

1630, Ides of March.

In the end, Niccolò was right, Yusuf’s unintentional painted prediction was correct: it wasn’t really supposed to last and so it did not.

Throughout the valleys and mountains of Italy, the Plague is striking once again.

It is nothing compared to the years of the Black Death, Yusuf and Niccolò whisper between themselves as to not let anybody else hear what they’ve got to say, when all of the continent flooded with madness and disease, when children vomited deadly bile and purulent deformities became the antechamber of normality, and yet pestilence fails once again to become something they must accustom to - they , beings that apparently live forever.

It starts with the smallest of things, really; a child with some difficulties to breathe properly, a pauper’s body lying lifeless over the church’s bench just the day after the person sought sanctuary and it is done. Whatever flows through the air, now permeates every breath, every puff of wind, every inch of a city that’s about to become the reign of death.

Yusuf himself has already caught it, even died from it, in a couple of days, inside the four walls of their sealed apartment at the first floor of the building behind the Franciscan Basilica, and Niccolò is surprised with himself about how well they were able to hide it from the rest of the world.

The gentle soul had simply shut every blinder and obstructed the passage of their doors with wooden shovels; he didn’t answer when they came for him, nor for l’Africano, and let the friends they had made throughout the years of their permanence in Bologna believe they had fled the city like cowards, running away from the plague and the responsibilities towards other humans that came with it.

They did in fact flee – eventually - after Yusuf started breathing again, leaving with the favor of the night. They said goodbye to Bologna during her darkest hour, ran with just a couple of items, the keys to the mill they had acquired in the country and a few sacks of flour so that they could later bake bread. They passed through the guards and climbed the walls, both smashing their heads to the ground when they jumped.

They didn’t even bid farewell to the elderly Reni and his associates.

Niccolò had cried, sprawled over their single bed, next to Yusuf’s body, devoured by the Plague and waiting for resurrection, thinking about all they had lost and how it had all spiralled down to desperation in a matter of weeks, instants for them. He had wanted so much to answer to his fellow cooks’ pleas, to just barge out their apartment and give all the help that was needed.

But he knew he couldn’t, it had already happened before. It was only a matter of weeks before they would have taken a hold on their secret and for how much Niccolò loved the people that had surrounded them in the past few years, he couldn’t risk to see his Yusuf once again at the hands of raging flames and skinning knifes.

“Witchcraft, witchcraft”, are the words that still echo in Niccolò’s ears, in four different distant languages from many centuries ago, even now that Yusuf’s come back and they’re dusting the walls of their safehouse, scratching spider webs and collecting wood for the chimney, as he’s listening to Yusuf’s singing and he’s spreading the blinders towards the outside space, to clean them off.

Leaning to the windowsill from the second floor, Niccolò can still catch the sight of the tallest buildings of Bologna, its towers and its churches, in all of their majesty, and thinks once again that it had been too good to be true.

Maybe he will wake up tomorrow under an oak, sleeping next to Yusuf, crouched over a wet patch of earth humid with rain and dow, somewhere in the woods of Transylvania, and he will know that it was all just a dream.

But as he keeps waking up in a soft, warm bed, next to the naked body of his lover, catching a glimpse over the latter’s shoulder of the white squares and rectangles that are his beloved’s paintings enveloped in clothes, as they bake fresh bread every day and hunt for wild rabbits and the fruits of the country, as he listens to Yusuf’s musings over whether he should frescoe the walls of their house, Niccolò knows that apparently, , even if surrounded by so much death, their Arcadia has yet to crumble down.

Mayhem is already claiming this continent in a way that goes beyond the chaos and anger that the plague is settling upon this country. The religious wars have not quite finished yet, it appears, and Andromaca and Quynh must be already searching for them. When the situation will have quieted down, when his Yusuf will have sold enough paintings to gain a couple of coins to bring with them, they will leave once again towards their destiny.

But their immortality sets them above any conception of passing time and death, Niccolò realizes, for how cruel it is to consider this opposite the sufferings of their fellow humans, cannot touch them.

They still have a couple of months left, he muses one day over a sunset, as they lie on a grass field and Yusuf’s frame is bathed in the golden rays of the sun, and they might as well enjoy it.

“What should I do?”, he says in arabic, while placing a flower crown over the top of his lover’s head.

Yusuf shrugs, rolls over on his stomach and places his head on Niccolò’s knee before responding.

“Paint?”

1630, July

He does it. Niccolò actually tries it.

One afternoon, right before evening descends upon them, he borrows a piece of paper and a stone of charcoal from Yusuf’s supplies and as soon as he starts sketching the old pine trunk that takes roots behind their wel,l he considers the possibility that he might be terrible at this.

Not only the subject at hand does not look like its real counterpart - it barely reminds him of a brick full of clots of clay – but it didn’t even cross Niccolò’s mind that his hand, if not raised properly, might drag the charcoal’s ring all around the sheet, staining the drawing in ways that turn the desired trunk into a halo of darkness.

Nonetheless, that same night, Yusuf challenges him to give it another try, whispering words of encouragement and endearment between the puffs of breath he lets out as l’Africano, Niccolò’s beautiful painter, much enthusiastically rides his dick.

So the next day, sated in his lust and in his hunger, he starts again - directly with paint and colors this time (“for some people it works”, Yusuf had told him with a smile) - and slowly gets a hold of it.

Excruciatingly slowly.

Yusuf sits on his lap from time to time, straddles his middle and peppers his jaw and jugular with kisses while teaching Niccolò how to blend colors, how to knead its pigments (that Yusuf kept stacked inside the cavities of their grindstone) with oil and eggs, how to lay the shades of blue and red and green on the canvas as to obtain the desired effect and in a couple of weeks -doing _just_ this –Niccolò reaches what he deems a decent technique.

It is certainly nothing like l’Africano’s, Niccolò’s canvases are still too grainy, his blending and shadowing still too unsophisticated, but Yusuf keeps insisting that Niccolò is doing great, that what he managed is pretty impressive for someone who started such a short time ago.

“Ora hai solo bisogno di un soggetto, amore mio.”, he tells him in italian as they watch from the windows the pouring rain that enriches the stream and agitates their mill, “You need the right inspiration to create your masterpiece.”

“What is yours?”, Niccolò asks his lover before taking a sip out of his brewed wine, handing to the man next to him a similar concoction.

“Why, my love, everything you’re in.”, Yusuf cheesily replies with a wide smile and a theatrical gesture that points towards the painting hanging above their head, a frameless canvas that depicts a bearded, long haired Niccolò staring at the observer, nude shoulders and even barer eyes. Behind his painted figure, Yusuf’s – no l’Africano’s – signature peculiarity, the presence of a drape, a veil, here used to create the dramatic _chiaroscuro_ effect that he learned in Sicily by none other than “il Caravaggio”, as they called that tormented soul that Niccolò and Yusuf had learned to know as Michele - Michele from Caravaggio - but that l’Africano usually used to adorn the frame of his figures. 

Like he had adorned _Armida_ and so many others before her.

It’s heartwarming really, and special, the deep care and passion that Yusuf puts in everything he does.

May that be a fight, a painting, a poem or the simple act of making love.

The saracen had never been one to muse over things; early on in their weird relationship, Niccolò found out that he was a thoughtful, caring and intelligent spirit by nature, someone that seemed to have been born with an innate sense of what is wrong and what is right, who appeared to always have the answer and, were that not the case, someone that would confront any problem with serenity and a clear mind.

Unlike Niccolò had been taught, he soon realized – after the Siege of Jerusalem, when he couldn’t strike down the man in front of him – that his immortal companion, the muslim heathen, was in fact a creature, a human full of love, full of life; he did what he liked because he liked it, deriving joy from it and living every moment.

And, Niccolò might as well add, Yusuf had the perk of being good at everything he ventured into trying.

To say that Niccolò hadn’t envied this capacity of his during the first period of their life together would be a lie. But it was always Yusuf the one that helped him find out all the deep care and sweet feelings that the priest harboured in his own heart, hidden under layers of hatred.

It had been him that started their relationship, that kissed Niccolò first.

“How could God not want this, if I feel this way about you”, he had told Niccolò one of their very first times knowing each other. What a strange, wonderful man Niccolò remembers thinking after that sentence.

Yusuf taught him how to play shadows, how to write arabic, recited him poems and in the end followed Niccolò back to his home country, where he observed the christians’ practice of depicting visages and eventually let his curiosity evolve into a devoted practice.

He couldn’t remember when it started but Niccolò can still distinctly recall how that ‘look’ – the look of a painter - felt for the first time, the look of Yusuf staring at him like he was trying to capture not only Niccolò’s features, but his being entirely, the idea of him; it made him blush, it had brought tears to his eyes: it was something so intimate, more intimate than spending four hundred years together.

Through Yusuf’s paintings, Niccolò could see how his lover perceived him, it was like being in his soul, in his mind in a way that they have never experienced before.

And it was beautiful, Niccolò thought, Yusuf always made everything look beautiful.

Every leaf, every lash, every limb that was depicted out of his hand looked as if it was suspended in time, lingering in that soft moment that lays between the sighting of a lightning and the crash of its thunder, hanging in the sky as if they were the ancient gardens of the wretched Babylonia.

The touch of his hand, the dance of his brush strokes, never fail to remind Niccolò of the tale of the Burning Bush: it’s light, feathery and yet somehow burning of godly energy.

His characters always covered by a thin white veil, that would adorn their frames and hide their faces.

That was l’Africano’s style.

He knows he could never match him, that is not the point.

He loves Yusuf and he loves his paintings. And it is through painting himself that Niccolò fully understands why his long lost enemy likes this so much.

The world can become whatever you want it to be.

He watches his lover one day, when the plague looks to be temporarily abating, as he gets rid of his most beautiful paintings - off to Rome, off to the waiting Cardinals – from the holes in the blinders of their home’s second floor, and in that exact moment he finds himself wanting to at least try and reach Yusuf’s level.

When the art merchant, harnessed from head to toe with protective gear – gloves, mask, a long black tunic he will get rid off as soon as he’ll have terminated his tasks – collects Yusuf’s paintings and takes off, Niccolò opens the window and sees the love of his life, he too protected by a long white tunic made of silk and an equally long white veil that covers his face, move the drape from his visage, revealing an a cunning smile, Niccolò thinks he has found his inspiration.

The only standing figure for miles and miles of unkept nature, Yusuf could very well be a mirage, the celestial White Ghost of the Holy Spirit, an image sent from Heaven to light his path throughout the hell that an immortal life alone would be.

1630, Mid-October

The epiphany comes to him one autumn morning, with all the drawers shut as the wind blows and the disease rages through the plains of Romagna with as much potence as it did in the spring, after an endless marathon of sex that took place the night before, sprung both by desire and boredom.

Yusuf is laying on their bed, on one side, the covers only partially hiding his right foot. He’s about to doze off, cum staining his stomach and the inside of his thighs – alongside oil and other perfume-like substances - and his heavy lidded eyes are about to close.

And that’s there - right in that moment - that Niccolò recognizes the black, deep, infinite eyes of the _houri_ of Isfahan's illuminated manuscripts, the image of the heavenly creatures that he saw so many times and that layed in the back of his mind when thinking about this place, but that he could never fully put his finger on.

And he thinks he must grasp them.

So he takes a piece of parchment, places one candlelight near the bedstand, one next to the armchair opposite their bed where Niccolò is currently sitting, and starts sketching; it is not long before the bearded outlines of his lover’s visage clearly surface as feathery lines of charcoal traced above the piece of paper, not a minute must have passed before Yusuf’s black eyes look as watery as any time he recites his poems for Niccolò, nor does it take long for the former priest to perfectly render the body he learned to know so well, the body he just made love to, as a drawing, complete with chiaroscuro and all.

It almost looks like a _Compianto_ , a Lament over the Dead Body of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; an obscene one at that because, instead of using the motif of the drape that l’Africano seems so fond of to cover Yusuf’s sex, Niccolò lingers on his lover’s nudities - his penis, his testicles, his still stretched anus – and transforms the cum that sculpts the sinewy contours of his muscles into white flowers that rise from his backside and the head of his phallus, with the few whiting that is left, while the rest of the body is laid in a bath of racemes, branches and white musk.

Yusuf is truly one with nature in what Niccolò will later remember as the true masterpiece of his short production; he is a houri, laying in the middle of the Garden of Eden, he is Armida, that patiently awaits for her anger to quell in the Arcadia that her Rinaldo has abandoned her in.

Niccolò leaves his piece of parchment on the armchair and goes to reach Yusuf on their bed, caresses him awake before leaning in for a passionate kiss, tongues dancing with each other. Yusuf smiles and mockingly asks him if he’s really up for another round. Yet, Yusuf – nor Niccolò at that – ever fails to arouse each other and as the italian flips Yusuf’s body over towards the armchair and starts to suck on the saracen’s thigh, before taking his phallus in his mouth in one, clean stroke, the man still has time to direct his eyes towards the parchment over the seat and, holding Niccolò’s head where it is with both of his hands carding through the former priest’s hair, Yusuf manages to rasp out:

“You make me beautiful, my love.”

They kiss again.

And again and again.

And that’s how they spend the last months of the plague before Andromaca and Quynh find them; making love, painting, eating, hunting, more making love, more painting.

Equally undisturbed as they were back in Bologna. Equally in a state of dreamlike paradise.

Death may surround them, yes, and Niccolò might be unable to do anything to stop it and he might still not know why him, why it is him that is given such a great gift and what he’s supposed to do with it. But he surely understands how blessed he is, living through his insecurities beside the man that he would later call Joe.

By the time their immortal friends come by, show up on their doorstep, Niccolò has completed what Yusuf calls ‘the most beautiful artwork he has ever seen’ and Niccolò knows that, even though Yusuf really believes it, that is not true. Yet, he is still proud of it, even if he doesn’t love it as much as the sketch that he made that early October morning and that is now lost to God knows where.

They leave all their belongings there, hidden underneath a secret floor and amongst the paintings of l’Africano there lays a small, rectangular one, defined by a rudimentary mixture and an even rougher stroke: there, we can see a satyr with eyes full of myrth, as black as night, covered in hair, who stares directly at the observer from behind a tree.

All around him a forest that overflows with lively flowers and plants.

 _Et in Arcadia ego_ , recites the inscription of an altar in the foreground, the only indication of a subject, when the author is lost to the public.

**Author's Note:**

> * Guido Reni: one of the most important and sold artist of the early 17th century, he was the prominent figure of the Bolognese school that emerged under the classical influence of the Carracci Brothers.  
> *Armida:a saracen sorceress that falls in love with the Christian paladin Rinaldo in Torquato Tasso's 'Jerusalem Delivered' and is subsequently abandoned by him.  
> * ' Che cosa mi hai portato oggi, amore mio?' : 'What did you bring me today, my love?'  
> *pinze (as plural, pinza as singular): Jam-filled specialty of Bologna  
> * 'Pinze per tutti quanti': "Pinzas for everybody'  
> * Denijs Calvaert: a flemish painter that lived and worked in Italy most of his life during the late XVI century.  
> * San Francesco: in Italy, we refer to Basilicas and churches simply by the name they were assigned, in this case San Francesco is referring to the Basilica of Saint Francis in Bologna built in the 13th century.  
> * Wars of Religion: The European wars of religion were a series of Christian religious wars which were waged in Europe during the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries.Fought after the Protestant Reformation began in 1517, the wars disrupted the religious and political order in the Catholic countries of Europe. However, religion was only one of the causes, which also included revolts, territorial ambitions, and Great Power conflicts.  
> * 'Ora hai solo bisogno di un soggetto, amore mio': 'You only need a subject now, my love.'  
> * houri: they are women who will accompany faithful believers in Paradise.
> 
> Well, that's about it! Please let me know if I missed something, hope you enjoyed!


End file.
